>Brink: First Impressions on the PC

Brink is the new game from Bethesda and Splash Damage. It came out a couple weeks ago in a mostly unfinished state for the PC. I waited until recently and was finally able to get my hands on it. I was pretty apprehensive because of all the bug reports pouring in and the fact that I have an ATI card, which reportedly had a lot of issues. I can say that since the recent patch and driver updates from ATI, I had no issues at all running the game. The only bug I saw was when I alt-tabbed some graphical glitches stuck but going out of the server I was on and coming back in fixed it. I didn’t even have to restart the game.

I admittedly had high hopes for this game as Splash Damage made my favorite FPS of all-time, Enemy Territory. This game definitely borrows from that in heaps. The classes, Medic, Engineer, Operative and Soldier are almost taken wholly from Splash Damage’s previous games. I can’t speak too much for any classes but the Medic. Briefly, the Engineer can repair objectives, buff teammates gun damage. Operatives work much like the spies in TF2, they can also hack objectives. Soldiers use heavy weapons, like Gatling guns and can give out ammo. Medics can buff teammates health, heal and revive. These are all the basic functions of the classes.

Brink does give a ton of customization to each class. There are a million guns in this game, roughly. I have only unlocked basic perks through the 1-4 player missions you can do to learnt he game. These are very helpful, and I think for the challenges they can bring could be fun with a few friends. As far as perks, you have class specific perks and also general perks (such as your resource bar filling up faster or being larger). The resource bar is basically energy for class skills, reviving, buffing health for a medic. For the medic, the class specific buffs include an adrenaline boost, self-res, speed boost to give to teammates, health regen buff to give out and many others.

As far as the game play, I have played with and without an FPS config and both were buttery smooth for me. The movement in this game gives you glimpses of what frag movies for Brink will look like. There is a even a parkour course solo mission to complete. It is very well done, and I think we will all benefit from the frag movies and edits from this game. If you thought strafe jumps in Promod can get insane, wait until you see the wall bounces and slides in Brink. Skilled players will pull off some crazy stuff in this game. The shooting was just fine, and not clunky at all. it isn’t CoD smooth and takes some getting used to. It also has the strafe avoidance of Enemy Territory which means avoiding bullets by strafing and keeping your sites on your opponent is paramount.

Now for the bad stuff. The maps and number of players are way too small for what this game should be. 16 player max on servers (right now, Mod Tools are coming) is too small. The game is fast paced but not big enough. The objectives never move position, and that makes the maps become stale, even after a couple days. This lack of variety and size in the maps and teams is almost game breaking for me. This game desperately needs DLC or mod tools. It also needs some changes to the aiming, in my opinion. ADS is underpowered and hip fire is overpowered. It noticed almost no difference in my ability to kill people in either view.

That’s my initial view. You need to realize if you buy this game that’s it’s not TF2, it’s not CoD, it’s not Battlefield. It’s a little bit of all of them. It does have a learning curve, but I really did feel at home as a medic from my ET days. Overall, you might want to wait on buying it until some DLC or mod tools are out, but it’s a keeper for me. A great change of pace from CoD.

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